Familiar Road Loyalty Modeling Considering the Effect of Truckers’ Emotional Value

Abstract

This paper investigates the internal mechanism of the trucker’s willingness to use familiar roads by constructing a structural equation model of road loyalty, in which the influence of the trucker’s “emotional value” is additionally considered. The proposed method can be used to understand the trucker’s psychological needs to improve the level of road service. Based on questionnaire data, AMOS software was used to analyze the correlations and corresponding parameters among 10 latent variables and 30 explicit variables. The model results show that, in addition to the value of roads as a commodity, the emotional dependence of truckers in the process of using them also has an impact on the perceived value of road services. The results of model index scores show that truck drivers’ loyalty to the road does not represent their satisfaction, and familiarity with the road is still “forced” to be the first choice of most truckers due to the cost and trust in the reliability of unfamiliar roads when the road service quality and experience do not meet truckers’ expectations. The latent variable scores indicate that improvements in “road safety” and “costs” are the key points to improve truckers’ overall satisfaction with road freight access.